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Check
Your Beliefs
By Charley Reese
03/17/06 -- -- Let's play a
fantasy game to check on
our belief in human rights. Let's suppose that in
a
mythical state, a governor announced a campaign to
punish
African-Americans for alleged violence.
Step one is to confiscate the
land owned by
African-Americans, evict them from it and use the land
to
build massive new subdivisions. Only white
Protestant Christians may live
in these subdivisions.
Step two is to connect these all-white
Protestant
Christian settlements to each other by a highway on
which
African-Americans are forbidden to drive. To
facilitate control, the
automobile tags for
African-Americans will be a different color from
the
tags issued to white motorists. Checkpoints would be
set up all
around the state capitol to search and
harass African-Americans trying to
enter.
Would you support such a plan? Would you hail that
mythical
governor as a man of peace? Would you go to
your church congregation and
ask the members to send
money to the occupants of these white
settlements?
Would you lobby the federal government to subsidize
this
new apartheid state in our midst?
I don't think so. I think most
Americans would
consider such acts an abomination, un-American and
a
mockery of everything both Christianity and the United
States stand
for.
Well, if you would condemn such acts here directed
against
African-Americans, why won't you condemn
identical acts committed against
the Palestinians by
the state of Israel?
Those settlements you hear
about are built on
Palestinian land, and they are for Jews only.
New
roads that Palestinians are forbidden to use connect
them. The
entire West Bank is riddled with Israeli
checkpoints, where innocent
Palestinians are daily
humiliated and harassed. A trip to a nearby
village
can mean waiting in line at checkpoints for hours.
Palestinians
have died in these lines.
After all of these humiliations, abuses, the
houses
destroyed, the children killed, the olive trees
uprooted, how do
you think Palestinians feel about
Americans who support the Israelis no
matter what they
do to the Palestinians? Don't take my word about
these
abuses. Check out the Israeli human-rights
organization at
www.btselem.org/English.
If
you cannot condemn the flagrant abuses of
Palestinians by the Israeli
government, then you are
undoubtedly a bigot, the worst kind of racist pig
who
believes that Palestinians are some kind of subspecies
of the human
race. If you do condemn in your heart
these terrible abuses, but are afraid
to speak out
about them, then you are a damned coward.
I listened in
disgust to a congressional committee
hearing on the Palestinian elections.
It was all about
what the Palestinians have to do. It was as if
the
cops, interviewing a child who had been raped by an
adult, lectured
the child on dressing provocatively
and of being in places she should not
have been in.
The Palestinians are the victims here. It is
their
land that is occupied. They have no army. They are at
the mercy of
the Israeli government. They don't have a
superpower protecting them from
international
sanctions and supplying them with billions of dollars.
The
United States should be telling Israel to get out
of the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, to dismantle its
settlements and checkpoints, and to allow
Palestinian
refugees to return to or be compensated for the land
the
Israelis stole.
You want to know why we have a problem with
terrorism?
It's not Islamic fundamentalists or hatred of freedom.
It's
our support of Israel's unspeakable abuse of
Palestinians. Don't blame
Osama bin Laden. Blame the
president, Congress, the American Israel
Public
Affairs Committee and all the cowardly Americans who
practice
hypocrisy by claiming to be moral while
supporting gross immorality
committed against their
fellow human beings in Palestine.
© 2006 by
King Features Syndicate, Inc.
"Today's mighty oak is just
yesterday's nut, that held its ground."
- Anonymous
